'Tin Roof' Brutally True To Author's Form

June 24, 1985|By Elizabeth Maupin of The Sentinel Staff

As Maggie the Cat, the title character in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Jessica Lange cannot be still. Her hands move constantly -- fluttering over a powder puff, smoothing a silk slip, scratching clawlike at the screen of a door.

If this Maggie is a cat, she's a cat chasing her own tail, running circles around her stolid, immobile husband, Brick (Tommy Lee Jones), whose torpor is broken only by the pulsing of one muscle in his cheek.

This is the conflict in the American Playhouse production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the conflict between motion and stagnation, between a person who tries to change something and one who drinks to forget it. It's a compelling version of the grim drama that many people say is Williams' best work -- a work in which motion, however misguided, is the only hope.

PBS and the Showtime cable channel cooperated on this new production of the play, which was first produced on Broadway in 1955. The made-for- television version first aired on Showtime before that channel was available to Central Florida viewers, and it will be broadcast on PBS at 9 tonight.

Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara played Maggie and Brick in the original Broadway production, in which Burl Ives was Big Daddy; Kim Stanley and Elizabeth Ashley later were acclaimed as Maggie, and Elizabeth Taylor played the role opposite Paul Newman in the 1958 film.

This American Playhouse production is different from those early ones in one vital way -- it uses a revised ending that Tennessee Williams wrote for an American Shakespeare Festival production 10 years ago. Director Elia Kazan had convinced the playwright during the play's original rehearsals that the ending should be softened, and it was not until the decade before Williams' death that he was able to return his original intention to the play.

It is a long play, full of talk in which truth and lies are bandied about until it is unclear where one ends and the other begins. The place is the Mississippi Delta; the occasion is the 65th birthday party of Big Daddy Pollitt, owner of ''28,000 acres of the richest land outside the Valley Nile.''

The Pollitt family argues about who will inherit the farmland of the crusty, cancer-stricken old man -- son Gooper and his grasping, brood-mare wife, Mae, or long-favored, irresponsible son Brick and Maggie, his childless wife. And they argue about truth and mendacity, about giving up the fight to live or hanging on, as Maggie does, like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Director Jack Hofsiss has shot a handsome, opulent play-for-TV in which the camera rarely leaves the bedroom of Maggie and Brick and the atmosphere is almost claustrophobically oppressive. And his casting is impressive, with Rip Torn bringing a small touch of humanity to the monstrous Big Daddy, Kim Stanley as the stupid, well-meaning Big Mama, and David Dukes and Penny Fuller as Gooper and Mae.

Jessica Lange's is the showy role, all butterfly flutter and feline flex. Her ultra-Southern Maggie is so frantic that she seems half-crazy, but as she grows more still during the course of the play, she is like someone steeling herself for a hurricane -- her strength becomes clearer and clearer. Tommy Lee Jones, his Brick immobilized by drink and fear, is easily her equal. As liquor gradually dulls his character's courteous defenses, Jones allows that fear to come quietly to the fore.

One may reject Tennessee Williams' savage view of Southern family life or his portraits of rapacious women and coarse, brutal men. But it is impossible to discredit the power of his vision or to forget the very human quality of their needs. It is those conflicting needs that the actors in this PBS production make painfully, hauntingly plain.